Shockingly, it turns out that I may actually be a good saleswoman--!

The poor can't just eat oatmeal

It's finally happened--it's the rare conservative opinion which strikes me as too harsh on the poor.

The Agriculture Secretary was promoting his department’s new hunger (or, in contemporary parlance: “food insecurity”) survey on CSPAN this morning, and promising to expand the federal government’s role in feeding children. We do a good job with school lunches and breakfasts, Secretary Tom Vilsak said, but in the summer months, when kids are out of school, we need more centralized locations to give them their breakfasts and lunches.

Is it really the case that a minimally competent mother (we won’t even contemplate fathers here) in this fabulously wealthy country where food is so cheap cannot give her child a healthy breakfast in the morning? Granted, doing so at low cost entails shopping for food low on the processing chain and, horrors of horrors, actually cooking it. A portion of rolled oats in a large discount container costs pennies and takes five minutes to cook. Too onerous? I know that there is a shortage of decent supermarkets and fresh food in the inner city, a result of low demand and high crime. (Actually, there’s not a decent supermarket in all of New York City.) But a little planning should be able to overcome that shortage by occasional trips to someplace where you can buy in bulk. Here’s a test of whether someone is really suffering from hunger or even just “food insecurity”: Are you willing to cook legumes for a few hours? If not, you’re not starving and have no claim on the public purse.

If such minimal foresight and involvement is beyond the reach of a mother, she obviously shouldn’t have had a child in the first place, and now that it’s too late, maybe should not have custody. Of course the feds, ever eager to expand their reach, are not going to point that out. But the more that the government acts as a surrogate parent, the less parental responsibility we will get.

The author of this article writes from the perspective of a rich person; she asks herself what she would do if she suddenly had no bank account and a smaller income. But a rich person without money does not a poor person make. Instead of pursuing a rich person's lifestyle on a smaller scale, you have to pursue a whole new lifestyle. What is easy for a rich person becomes difficult, sometimes insuperably difficult. A special trip to a bulk store like Costco seems easy to the author--she has free time, money, transportation and social support. Without all of those, a store like that would seem impossibly far away.

What the author calls 'minimal foresight' may require more mental energy than a person living on a subsistence level can spare. You have to have the knowledge and strength of character needed to make plans, as well as the organization and free time needed to execute those plans. And keep in mind that the people we're talking about are not only poor, and in most cases congenitally poor, but also single mothers, often of many children. I can't imagine how stressful that would be. It's easy to say that people should be able to make plans and follow through, and should be able to put aside a small amount of money. They can't. It's harder for them.

It also seems unrealistic to expect the poor to spend as little money as possible in all situations. No other social class does that--how could they? People need to alleviate their feelings of deprivation sometimes--whether it's through buying a third car or through buying cereal rather than oatmeal. And poverty-alleviation programs, like everyone else, need to work with the realities of human nature.

I also love the fact that the author implies that the government should take away a mother's custody of her child--because the alternative is government "acting as a surrogate parent" and overreaching.

Landscape of Thorns

Check out this article on communicating the dangers of nuclear waste to humans 10,000 years in the future: my favorite is the "Landscape of Thorns." However, as the article basically concludes, if human beings in the future aren't smart enough to figure out that being around radioactivity is unhealthy, we probably can't help them, and they probably deserve to die out.

Glorious wisdom of Chairman MAO

What is work? Work is struggle.

We shouldn’t read too many books. We should read Marxist books, but not too many of them either.

I don’t believe that men alone are capable of having two hands. Can’t horses, cows, sheep evolve? Can only monkeys evolve?

Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty did pretty well in his early years, but afterwards he read many books, and didn’t make out so well anymore. He died of hunger in T’ai Ch’eng. It is evident that to read too many books is harmful.

The principle of preserving oneself and destroying the enemy is the basis of all military principles.

It is not true that everything is good. But neither is it true that everything is bad.

We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.

Some play the piano well and some badly, and there is a great difference in the melodies they produce.

It is difficult to do good all one’s life and never do anything bad.

Vulgar locutions on the rise

Here's one I came across recently:

*The bird couldn't reach its beak through the cage.

where the proper English would be:

The bird couldn't reach through the cage with its beak.

or

The bird's beak couldn't reach through the cage.

Another example is:

*Can you reach me that book?

Instead of:

Can you reach that book, and can you hand it to me?

I think the improper usage is becoming more common, and I can see why: the meaning is clear, the sentence structure more direct, and there's no conspicuous vulgarity (I doubt most people would recognize the impropriety at all.) Also, note the confusion with 'stretch', which, unlike 'reach' can be used transitively.

One that is equally logical is the use of 'itch' as a verb:

*I itched her itch.

For the vulgar, it's easier to remember one word than two, and 'scratch' already has separate meanings as a noun and a verb:

The cat had scratched me, so I had a scratch on my hand.

So, predictable, but annoying. Since there is no gain in logic or directness, this locution just seems like a way for the uneducated to decrease their vocabularies even more.

Football, dogfighting, and brain damage

I know, I know, sports are boring, but what about this:

"How many people who we assume have Alzheimer’s—a condition of mysterious origin—are actually victims of preventable brain trauma?"

Here's the article.

Good advice–and a bit of BDSM–from Montaigne

Good old Montaigne!

"To have my opinions contradicted doesn’t offend or harm me; instead it wakes me up and challenges me...I don’t mind being rudely attacked by my friends (You’re a fool, you’re dreaming). Among gallant men, a person should express himself boldly, letting his words go where his thought does. I like a strong and virile friendship, which prides itself on the acerbity and vigor of its conversation, as love prides itself on bites and bloody scratches. When someone contradicts me, he attracts my attention, not my anger; I feel drawn toward the person who contradicts me, who instructs me, and I love to gratify and nourish his liberty to warn me of my mistakes by my easy surrender; yes, even at my own expense."

Les contradictions donc des jugemens ne m’offencent, ny m’alterent; elles m’esveillent seulement et m’exercent...estre rudement heurté par mes amis : "Tu es un sot, tu resves." J’ayme, entre les galans hommes, qu’on s’exprime courageusement, que les mots aillent où va la pensée...J’ayme une societé et familiarité forte et virile, une amitié qui se flatte en l’aspreté et vigueur de son commerce, comme l’amour, és morsures et esgratigneures sanglantes...Quand on me contrarie, on esveille mon attention, non pas ma cholere ; je m’avance vers celuy qui me contredit, qui m’instruit...aymant à gratifier et nourrir la liberté de m’advertir par la facilitié de ceder ; ouy, à mes despans.



Montaigne, 3.8, De l’art de conférer

The Sixties

The Sixties, by Jenny Diski, has remarkably little to say about the Sixties as such. Most of the book is a personal meditation on the nature of youth--and one of the best such I’ve read, for instance this passage of realistic psychology:

I was sure, the first time I sucked on an LSD-soaked sugar cube, that it would be the end of me. I knew my depressive tendencies. I had had bad trips even on cannabis. The ether and the Methedrine had turned nasty. I was certain that my chances of becoming irredeemably psychotic on acid were very high. I said a serious goodbye to myself as I put the sugar cube on my tongue.

Nonetheless, I took it. Was it because taking a risk was worth the marvellous insights I believed I would get if the trip went the other way? Or, more likely, because risk was by definition good, or at any rate, necessary? There was no choice but to take whatever risk was on offer.

In the last two chapters, the author uses three of my favorite sixties and seventies theorists--Ivan Illich, R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz--to explore guiltily how “liberation got confused with libertarianism” and the Sixties became the Thatcher era.

The author describes radical teaching practices in the sixties, echoing some of the criticisms her political opponents make today:

We tended devotedly to the lower end of the ability spectrum but paid little attention to the more able. They were us, after all, and we were quite ashamed of our privileges. It got to the point where in some sense we punished the brighter kids for not being underprivileged...The radicals couldn’t always cope with education actually having an effect. If the oppressed stopped behaving like the oppressed, we ddin’t really like it.

Diski’s work as a teacher was influenced by Illich’s ideas, which she now says were both more radical and more right-wing than she had realized. Here’s a sampling of Illich, the author of “Deschooling Society” and the man “too radical for the radical generation”:

The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect...In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.

Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young, especially to the poor, an obligation to process them, whether by love or by fear...

Illich seemed like a leftist at the time, but in fact, when his sort of libertarianism is opposed to paternalistic statism, Diski and her generation are usually on the side of the state.

The majority of the activists in my generation were never as interested in individual liberty as we were in finding ways to implement our own ideas of how the world should be. I’m not sure, on Illich’s still startlingly strict definition, if we were interested in liberty at all...

Illich could well have joined Thatcher and Reagan’s theoretical advisers. I’d resist the claim that the Sixties generation were responsible for the Thatcher years, as I would resist the notion that the Jewish community in Germany were responsible for the advent of the Nazis, but sometimes I can’t help but see how unwittingly we might have been sweeping the path in readiness for the radical Right...

I will refrain from comment on the supposed Thatcherite/Nazi connection. Perhaps if the author were American, she would realize the Right gets a lot more radical than Margaret Thatcher.

Anyway, a less pejorative way of describing Sixties leftists is to say that they were concerned with caring for people rather than simply leaving them free to take care of themselves as best they can. Here’s where Szasz comes in--Diski, a former mental patient, rightly criticizes the author of “The Myth of Mental Illness” for being more concerned with the rights and freedoms of the so-called mentally ill than with their happiness and safety. (Although Szasz would probably point out that the nature of happiness and the value of safety are highly subjective.)

[Szasz believed that] the State had no business interfering with matters of the mind, or even supposing that Mind existed...He refuted the concept of madness in order to refute any claim for civic responsibility towards others...Everyone made their own individual choices: the rich, the poor, the mad, the sane. That was their problem.

Szasz also suggested that when the so-called mentally ill cause real social problems (by stealing, committing violent crimes, or just being a public nuisance) they should be prosecuted like other criminals. Diski takes this suggestion as a sign of Szasz’s lack of compassion for suffering. In fact, Szasz thought that the mentally ill would be protected by being treated like criminals, since those accused or convicted of a crime have many rights and privileges those accused or convicted of mental illness don’t have. (Tangent: an accused criminal has the right to counsel and the right to a fair trial (usually by jury). Most of those convicted of a crime are given a specific, limited sentence, one that cannot be extended indefinitely for the same offense and one that does not depend solely on the discretion of their jailors. From within a prison, prisoners can teach themselves the law, appeal their cases, sue, complain about their treatment. A person accused of mental illness or incarcerated in a mental asylum has none of these advantages.)

Despite this misreading, Diski, in characterizing Szasz and Illich as ‘radical’ ‘far right’ thinkers is pointing to a real and unresolved tension between the idea that people should be free and the idea that society should care for its members (whether they like it or not). The school versus the market, if you will. In the Sixties, the author thought that communitarianism and liberty were naturally joined in leftist political theory--after Thatcher, she knows better, and seems quite willing to abandon liberty along with libertarianism.

Tune in next time for a discussion of Marxist theories of human nature, why Asian people don't understand sidewalks, and, of course, Proust!

From a favorite opera

In this aria, Clytemnestra appeals to her divine ancestors, Zeus and Helios, to protect her daughter Iphigenia:



The lyrics are here.

What do these words have in common?

address, inquiry, mustache, advertising, cigarette, locate, addict, rebound, mama, princess, abdomen, finance, recess, defect, research
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All words that, in British English, were once accented on the second or third syllable, but, thanks to our glorious American influence, are now accented on the first! (Or were made into nouns [addict, research] and then accented on the first!)

George W. Bush's Marxist heritage

Three lessons the Bush administration learned from Trotsky and Stalin:

1) Democracy is good (when the right people win)

Trotsky's amazing transformation from a supporter of Lenin and totalitarianism to a foe of Stalin and friend of democracy just happened to come at the same time he was thrown out of Russia and the Party. True socialist democracy, he believed, is shown to be such by the fact that the workers (read: Trotskyists) win elections. Similarly, the Western world regularly rejects free and fair elections when they don't lead to the right result. If the people the West supports don't win, the election's result can't be 'really' the will of the people, and the people in question can expect to see itself ostracized (like Austria in the 90s) or even denied food aid (like Palestine more recently).

2) The people are with us (they just don't know it yet)

We are giving the people what they want, since we are on the crest of the wave of history. Just a little longer, and they'll realize they want the form of government we choose to give them.

3) Whether a war is aggressive or defensive matters less than its class character

Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin believed that in any war, the side of the proletariat is the right side. Whether the proletariat started the war or not matters little--morality doesn't apply to a conflict between capitalist imperialists and the proletariat. Class is all we should notice. Hence Trotsky's prediction that World War II would end with all the capitalist countries allied against the Soviet Union.

Similarly, the Bush doctrine of 'preemptive war' and the plausible-sounding theory that democracies don't fight each other.

(This theory is in fact deeply doubtful. Its most well-known exponent defines 'democracy' as a system in which two-thirds of adult men can vote. But this definition is invented solely to support the author's thesis--if any more than two-thirds of adult men were required to be enfranchised, ancient Athens wouldn't qualify as a democracy. Any less than two-thirds and the Confederacy would. 'Democracies never fight each other' only if we arbitrarily categorize some societies (like the Confederacy and Sparta) as oligarchies, and some not-very-different ones as democracies.)

The more I learn about Marxism, the more I realize that the troublesome thing about a government is not its specific policies but rather the structure and nature of governmental power. In other words, high taxes on the rich versus high taxes on the poor matters much less than totalitarianism versus liberalism.

Out-of-wedlock births in the lower classes

A recent book I read provides an interesting portrait of what sociologists lately call 'the under class'–this is thought to be more PC than 'the lower class'. The book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. It's an attempt to explain to middle-class readers (well, the authors only talk about the middle class, so I assume they mean middle and upper class) why poor women often have children out of wedlock, and at a very young age (a mean age of 21, including many women who gave birth at younger ages, even thirteen and fourteen).

The poor are different from us; they have less money. The personal touches in this book give us glimpses of a strange new world--one where a sixteen-year-old boy will tell his girlfriend, 'I want to have a baby by you'--and she takes it as a compliment! There are a few fascinating statistics–"the poor, the less-educated, those living in poor neighborhoods, and those raised in single-parent households tend to have far fewer friendships than their more advantaged counterparts." And, of white women who have never had a premarital birth, 89% will get married before they turn 40. We're all doooomed....

But, the authors say, poor women have many of the same beliefs about marriage as the rest of us. Most people today of whatever class believe that marriage is difficult and divorce is to be avoided, and that for that reason, people should wait to get married until they are older and until they know and trust their prospective partners very well. There is a perception that getting married means settling down--the end of travel, fun, career change and flexibility. With these beliefs, it makes sense that members of the lower classes don't marry early. So the question is not, 'Why don't they get married?', but rather, 'Why do they have babies?'

SImply put, because the perceived costs of having children are lower, and the perceived benefits higher. As for the benefits, what would you do if you had little or no higher education or career ambitions to look forward to? Having children might seem like the only really meaningful thing in your life–the only thing giving you hope for the future. When asked to imagine what their lives would be like without children, the women in the study typically said things like, 'I'd be dead.' 'I'd be in jail.' 'I'd be depressed.' 'I'd still be partying.' 'I'd be on drugs.' These seem to be the other options.

As for the costs, the out-of-pocket costs of having children are the same whether the mother is 30 or 13. But the opportunity costs of children are very different for different classes. Specifically, they're much lower for the lower classes.

The public often assumes that early childbearing is the main reason why so many girls from poor inner-city areas fail to complete high school, go on to college, gain valuable work skills, or earn decent wages, but there is virtually no evidence to support this idea. Any childbearing at all, and especially early childbearing, has huge opportunity costs for middle-class women. But disadvantaged girls who bear children have about the same long-term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid or late twenties to have a child...Early childbearing is highly selective of girls whose other characteristics–family background, cognitive ability, school performance, mental health status, and so on–have already diminished their life chances so much that an early birth does little to reduce them much further.

The authors focus on the agency of the women in their study, and it seems as though these women chose to become pregnant, rather than being coerced into it by their boyfriends or by a lack of access to birth control or abortion. This leads the authors to ignore some signs of lack of agency–a really amazing passivity, not just in some cases, but in most. For instance, only 17% of these women's pregnancies were planned. Some were 'accidents', but, bizarrely, the plurality were described as 'in between' an accident and a planned pregnancy. Typically, the woman will say that she didn't want to get pregnant, but that she wasn't using any birth control. It is almost impossible for me to understand how a person could leave such an important decision up to chance–but hey, it's the traditional way. The women studied say things like, 'The baby happened', 'God gave me this baby' and so forth.

I wonder if this lack of agency is related to their socioeconomic statuses. Making a decision is a skill like any other, and needs to be practiced. We read that children who have grown up under circumstances display 'learned helplessness'–they have learned that nothing they can do can make a positive difference in what happens to them, and that actively doing anything often brings punishment. So they take no action. They may express preferences, but they do not intervene in their own fate. Maybe for the lowest classes, something similar happens.

On magical thinking

Why is it, that, before a job interview, I obsess over my shoes and think of the answers to interview questions, instead of accepting that the result of the interview is almost entirely out of my control? Malinowski* has the answer!

When a man feels himself impotent in a practical situation, whether he be savage or civilised, whether in possession of magic or entirely ignorant of its existence, passive inaction, the only thing dictated by reason, is the last thing in which he can acquiesce. His nervous system and his whole organism drive him to some substitute activity....The substitute action in which the passion finds its vent, and which is due to impotence, has subjectively all the virtue of a real action, to which emotion would, if not impeded, naturally have led.

Now that my attention has been drawn to it, I see such magical thinking everywhere I look. Whenever I start to care about petty things, it's because subconsciously I think these details have magical power over things that matter. If I brush my hair more often, people will like me. If I do the dishes, it means my life is under control. And other absurdities. The antidote is provided by La Rochefoucauld, who says:

Those who concern themselves too much with little things usually become incapable of great ones.
Ceux qui s'applique trop aux petites choses deviennent ordinairement incapables des grandes.

*Bronislaw Malinowski, the early 20th-century Polish-American anthropologist, used to be rather famous in social-sciences circles, but his ideas have since been discredited/assimilated into the mainstream. I am not ashamed of being behind the times.

In The Illusion of American Omnipotence, DW Brogan pointed to a state of mind which he called “ the illusion of American omnipotence”--defined as “the illusion that any situation which distresses or endangers the United States can only exist because some Americans have been fools or knaves.” When the Chinese Revolution occurred, instead of concluding that this was a response to massive strategic and economic realities largely beyond our control, millions of Americans were apparently convinced that this enormous country had been in our pocket, and had been lost or stolen only because of the mistakes (or treachery) of Roosevelt, Marshall, and Acheson, mistakes which could easily have been rectified by greater statesmen like Walter Judd or Senator Jenner.

---Hofstadter

6 things to hate about Feminism

--at least mainstream feminism, specifically the kind in this article:

http://community.feministing.com/2009/09/on-beauty-and-its-consequences.html

1) It exaggerates the benefits of being male.

"Men are presented with an endless supply of female flesh as a reward for good capitalist behaviour..."

Hmm, do I know anyone who has "an endless supply of female flesh"? And when I think about men who get a lot of female attention, it doesn't really seem like society is awarding women to them in little gift bags. In fact, women seek out rich or confident or otherwise attractive men--but that sort of formulation makes it seem like the women are acting freely, clearly an unacceptable implication.


2) It exaggerates the disadvantages of being female.

In this worldview, just as men get everything they want, women get nothing they want. Should you seem angry about being accosted or harassed on the street,

"society will look at you with great alarm, and declare you a man-hating, ugly hairy bitter feminist."

Any woman who has ever rejected a man is then excluded from society if not shot--I couldn't make this up, people:

"Should you reject your would-be suitors, you are a bitch and risk getting shot in public or private places. At the very least you will be ostracized, you will be considered difficult, or you will be ridiculed on some other account."

3) Like many liberal theories, this sort of feminism is utopian. We plow straight ahead trying to change the basics of life, without considering that it might not be possible. This is rebellion against nature itself; for instance, when woman's status as a sexual being is described as tyranny:

"...this purpose which was created for you, without your consent, without you getting a vote on the subject, well before you were born."

4) Sexist tropes in the media are considered more revealing than the trends of actual life. For instance, the author ignores a long list of female heads of state, leaders of opinion, and intellectuals in the real world in order to criticize Hollywood.

"Whatever else you achieve - intelligence, education, talent, saving the world, etc. - must be done in heels, with long flowing hair, and a surgically-enhanced figure like the one on Lara Croft, because otherwise: well, poor you."

This person has been watching too many movies! Actual women in power aren't subject to the standards of blockbuster movies--rarely do they have long hair or wear revealing clothing, and if Hillary Clinton isn't the leader of the free world, well, the problem was not her cup size.

5) It's fucking depressing! "You are not in control", "you have probably been harassed, groped or assaulted", "you have no right to your own beauty", "whatever joy you may have felt at being pretty evaporates", "society declares you an awful person", "being angry and depressed is logical and lucid", "men will consume and destroy you", "you are a chicken in a slaughterhouse".

Is this really what young women new to the world and to men need to hear? This just makes me afraid to leave the house. Maybe that's the idea.

6) Men are the enemy; they are not vulnerable or well-intentioned like women; they never worry about the right thing to do, never feel guilty, and never apologize. Any sympathy for them is misplaced. They must be humiliated and CRUSHED:

"Remember the men who do these things to you are not playing fair, they will never consciously apologize of their own volition, and they will never hesitate to crush you if you threaten them. You must give yourself the right to do the same to them. Never feel sorry for them, never apologize, and never look back...You will have to reject and humiliate men, without mercy, very loudly, in front of as many people as possible, when you don't want men looking at or touching you if they are doing this. Of course, this will make you look like a bitch, which is a daunting prospect, but as a woman you have those two choices: bitch, or victim."

(I kind of like that last line. Although why 'consciously apologize'? An unconscious apology is a priori impossible.)

"Should this scenario happen in the office, you may be told you are disturbing the workplace peace and atmosphere and you may have to come out kicking and screaming against this injustice, which will probably get you fired, and will force you to go to a Human Rights Commission which may or may not award you a few thousand dollars after five years of litigation and blacklisting during which your career is completely destroyed."

That's right, a woman who rejects a coworker's advances will be reprimanded, fired and finally blacklisted. This wasn't true even 80 years ago.

It's painfully clear that the author has had annoying experiences with men on the street and coworkers. I sympathize--well, contra her claims, most people of either sex sympathize with women who are harassed by clueless men. The author's arrogance and blindness comes in when she assumes her experience and female experience are congruent. Would you say that you don't mind being complimented or hit on? Or that you think you have power over men? Or that your male coworkers are kind and professional? Or that you've never been raped or assaulted? Just wait, says the author. My terrible experience is the Truth of women's experience, and if neither you nor anyone you know experiences it this way, you should probably feel guilty about being privileged.

One of the most ignorant books I've read

This is a review of Ellen Ruppel Shell's book, 'Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture." Using 'cheap' as an insult proves nothing so much as the speaker's class prejudices. This book falls into that same trap. In an attempt to imitate objective journalism, the book contains many true narratives and well-documented facts. Then, on top of those facts, we are given a list of the author's opinions. There is little attempt to convince the reader that one follows from the other, and, often, the facts and the opinion don't seem even theoretically related.

For instance, her section on Ikea makes some valid points. Although Ikea says its wood is sustainably harvested, they haven't proved it; some people find Ikea furniture hard to assemble (although I think it's fun); and Ikea stores are big and sparsely located, so people have to drive farther to get to them. Then, without warning, she concludes the section with this:

Flatpacks of medium-density fiberboard hauled out of sprawling warehouses and cobbled together with IKEA's notorious L-shaped, six-sided Allen wrench are not tasteful, comfortable furniture. They are a facsimile of tasteful, comfortable, furniture.

None of this has come out of what she wrote before. I could excuse the woman's bias if she would at least be precise about what she objects to. What has the 'notorious' Allen key done to her? It seems like a pretty useful tool to me.. Or is it the flatpack or the size of the warehouse that we should hate? An example of the power of rhetoric to describe perfectly neutral things in terms that repel. And the question of how people can think they are comfortable in a chair, while Shell knows they are not actually comfortable, is a little beyond me.

Shell doesn't understand class:

Even for a book on the subject of material things, the author is materialistic. The word 'cheap' is used solely to disparage. The implication is that people who buy cheap goods are selfish, careless or at least short-sighted. Never once does the author recognize that we might not be choosing between 'cheap' goods and quality goods, but between 'cheap' goods and nothing. She consistently equates brand with quality, and appears to think it is morally wrong for a brand to produce a cheaper version of itself, because it betrays the 'trust' she has in brands. Outlet stores, where poor people can buy the same brands rich people do, are morally suspect for this reason.

A philosopher might question whether a Coach bag of questionable quality hawked by clerks who do not know the provenance of their merchandise is the Coach bag of our dreams...the uncoupling of brand name and product can't help but confuse us and, over time, even undermine our trust.

Dear God, imagine people losing faith in Coach! Actually, a person who trusts in a brand deserves to be disappointed--and incidentally, a philosopher would not be dreaming about a handbag. And if the people who shop at discount stores are content with the prestige value of their 'Coach' bags, why should the author take it upon herself to tell them they should find their purchases worthless? Buying a knockoff makes a lot more economic sense for most of us than paying full price. People who buy Coach bags don't care about the quality of the stitching. Does the author really think a handbag that costs $800 is 40 times better than the $20 one? Price may be an indicator of quality sometimes, but not here.

She doesn't understand history:

In Adam Smith's England, she thinks, people of every class bought high-quality products for a fair price. And because people knew the merchants from whom they bought, the merchants never exploited their customers. "You can only cheat your neighbor once." So, no grocer ever adulterated his merchandise, no innkeeper ever added fraudulent charges to his bill, no worker ever absconded with his wages. People were honest and good. All that changed because of international corporations and globalization.

Shoddy clothes, unreliable electronics, wobbly furniture, and questionable food have become the norm...The combination of quality and value, once available to the many, is now affordable only to the few.

Is this idealism, or just stupidity? First of all, there _were_ cities in the 18th century, London, for one, so people weren't always buying from their neighbors. And even in villages, people in the past didn't "buy local" in order to make a political statement--they had no other choice. And when you're buying local because transportation and communication over long distances are prohibitively expensive and take forever, you have no choice but to continue buying from your neighbor. Even if he puts vinegar in his wine or plaster of Paris in his bread (both formerly common practices). Anyone who has read a single 18th century novel or history knows that dishonesty, then as now, existed wherever dishonest people did.

And definitely doesn't understand economics:

She appears ignorant of the basic idea of comparative advantage:

Haiti once exported rice. Today [after a tariff reduction], three-quarters of the rice on Haitian dinner plates comes from the United States. Paying for imported food requires cash, and acquiring that cash usually means getting a job providing the First World with something it wants--either raw materials, such as timber, minerals, or coffee, or cheap mass-manufactured goods.

Yes. That's how it works. This is an example of the author writing so as to suggest that what she describes is bad--avoiding the trouble of actually giving a reason why it's bad. She seems to think buying food when you once produced it is an unqualified evil. So farmers are a priori better off than factory workers. Also, local food is a priori better than imported food, and when business provides cheap imported food which poor people can buy, this is bad, and governments should step in:

Rather than flooding markets in developing countries with cheap food, thereby weakening incentives to grow and process food locally, aid should be given directly to the poor to help them purchase food at fair prices.

She also thinks Americans, unlike every other people in history, are incapable of developing new skills in response to changes in economic incentives:

The idea that more and more Americans can reinvent themselves into ever more challenging work is a pipe dream.

I am glad I read the book, although I wish I had stopped with the sociology and skipped the opinions. There are several interesting bits--for instance, I didn't realize that a store's setting one price for everyone was, at one time, a revolutionary move. A interesting aside is that printing coupons or offering rebates is really a way of offering two prices--the person who is sensitive about spending money will clip the coupon, and buy your product--the person who cares less, or is less organized, will have his attention drawn to your product, and buy it without bothering to redeem the coupon.

But, my God, this is one of the most ignorant books I've ever read. And yet I have seen no critical reviews of it. The quality of the author's mind or scholarship doesn't seem to matter so much as the fact that the conclusions she comes to sound progressive and plausible--and support the rich, liberal belief that virtue can be attained by shopping at upper-class-coded stores rather than other stores.

I think sometimes in political discussions, there's a tendency to think that everyone who disagrees with you is evil or ignorant.

Beneath the din is a simple premise: if the other side knew the facts, if the other side really understood what was at stake, they would all surely agree. But they disagree, thus, they must not understand. Or they must be crazy.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14257491&CFID=2742886&CFTOKEN=75016751

Maybe we would have more productive discussions if we could accept that, just as we've all had different childhoods, we all have different personalities and therefore different opinions.

A hilarious article from Nerve--they have such realistic female characters!

"I like you," he said. "I wanna take things slowly."

Take . . . things . . . slowly.

Was this some French phrase I wasn't familiar with? It sounded like English, but what did it mean?

On teenagers

A Salon article on parents dealing with their ‘delinquent’ children. What happens if your child is not the kind of person you envisioned?

("She's a bad girl," writes Lara. "And I made her. If a factory is judged by its product, I'm a bad mother.")

Both mother and daughter love each other and hate each other in equal measure. Both are prone to fits of drama and exaggeration. As a reader, it is difficult, if not impossible, to sift out a true and accurate account of what actually happened during the teen years of these girls. But truth and accuracy, in these books, are nearly beside the point. It's more interesting to look at what these mothers think happened to their daughters than it is to concern oneself with whether they are correct.

As a teenager, Martha Tod Dudman had sex, smoked pot, dropped acid, was not allowed to graduate with her class at the prestigious Madeira School and ran away to live in a Tenderloin tenement in San Francisco at age 17.

Dudman's daughter, Augusta, wears her mother's hippie clothes from the '60s, smokes pot and does acid. To Dudman, Augusta's pot smoking is different from her own: "I know it's not the gentle grass of the sixties. They treat it with something now, don't they? It's powerful." When Dudman's ex-husband tells her that he believes their daughter when she says that she finds drinking disgusting and has only smoked pot once or twice, Dudman thinks, "With the drugs, she had to have lots of them. Had to have every kind. Had to take everything. If she could have, she would have smoked fifteen cigarettes at once. I know because I was like that, too."

Dudman eventually decides to ship Augusta off to a wilderness treatment program in Oregon. It's hard to say whether this makes the situation better or worse. Augusta is so miserable that she slashes her wrists in the first few weeks. And when she gets the chance, Augusta busts out of the treatment center and, like her mother before her, runs away to San Francisco. (This really sends Dudman over the edge: She and another parent send both the FBI and a hired thug to hunt down their daughters and bring them back into captivity.)

This is fairly typical parental behavior. No one ever pauses to think that her children might have human rights.


Just like Sherlock Holmes, observation follows from hypothesis rather than the other way around. If you’re convinced there’s something wrong with your child, then the slightest foibles (watching too much TV, swearing, staying out late) become serious problems. If you were a little less quick to condemn your child, these things would never lead you to kidnap and imprison her. I think it all stems ultimately from a parent’s lack of self-love...

Perhaps the biggest obstacle that teens face is the fact that every parent was once a teen. And the memories these parents have of their own adolescence make it virtually impossible for them to see the teenagers in front of them.

Michael Pollan on food

Another article by Michael Pollan. He is a fanatic--a sympathetic one, but a fanatic. For instance, he thinks the healthcare crisis exists because people eat the wrong foods. Is that true? Personally, all the health care I’ve consumed has been either preventive care or antibiotics I took for communicable diseases (which I got because I went to institutional schools.) I, like most people, never became obese or diabetic because of my diet. Most health care costs come from basic preventive medicine or from the normal diseases of old age (including cancer, heart disease, etc.).

Also, Pollan’s description of food costs is filled with vagueries and inaccuracies.

Organic food is not subsidized in any way.

However you feel about free trade with regard to your computer or your car, my guess is that, if you thought about it, you'd feel differently about your food.

As if our feelings were relevant!

When he directly confronts food costs, he becomes harsh and judgmental:

I think people just have to dig down in their pockets and spend more for food. We seem to be able to afford spending $50 to $100 a month on television and cellphones.

Note the air of condescension here; a phone is a frivolity (although when I was trying to find a job, it sure seemed like a necessity!), while paying three times the normal price for eggs, as Pollan advises, is a rational decision.

I do have a certain sympathy for those who think we should be buying better food--but why don’t they devote their energy towards making better food affordable? As long as ‘organic’ and ‘natural’ foods are harder to find, spoil faster, and cost $6 for a loaf of bread or a carton of eggs, only relatively rich people will buy them. As it is now, telling poor people to spend more money than they have to on food is worthy of Marie Antoinette.

Sherlock Holmes was wrong

I just got around to reading Pierre Bayard’s 2008 book, Why Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong. (Bayard, the author of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, is a Freudian famous for injecting epistemology into literary criticism, with a special interest in middlebrow mystery fiction.)

Bayard’s entire style is a bit nonplussing. If you take things too seriously, reading him will just be frustrating. He is a fundamental skeptic--and we’re not used to applying skepticism to works of fiction. Bayard does not believe that the text is static...

Many elements presented to us in a text as established truths are actually, when looked at, carefully, only eyewitness accounts.

This skepticism allows him to look at the mystery of the Hound of the Baskervilles from outside, like any other testimony which needs to be weighed and judged. (N.B.: most of this will not much sense unless you have read the book.)

He asks, why does Sherlock Holmes fail so often? His method, observation leading to deduction leading to further observation, would seem scientific--but we are continually shown his mistakes and hurried misjudgements. But on what does deduction depend? On clues--which are what? Observed phenomena which someone deems significant. Upon the definition of a ‘clue’ hinges every one of Holmes’ cases. For instance, in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, the detective’s investigation is set off by one man’s unverified observation of a set of pawprints. (Even on the tenth reading, I always find myself slightly suspicious of Dr. Mortimer.) Based on that single ‘clue’, Holmes forms a hypothesis.

The detective’s hypothesis rests on a figure (that of the murderer with the dog) and a motive (that of financial interest). Note that this construction eliminates other hypotheses, for instance the police’s hypothesis of accident, and that of a murder committed in a different way or for a different motive.

This hypothesis then guides Holmes to value certain observations as ‘clues’ and devalue others. The hound is perceived as dangerous, although it is never seen attacking anyone until Holmes and Watson shoot it. Selden’s death is perceived as a murder, although there is no evidence the dog or the murderer was present--and even Holmes admits that he and Watson have

...only surmise and conjecture. We should be laughed out of court if we came with such a story and such evidence.

We should also consider the absurdity of using a dog as a murder weapon in an attempt to frighten Sir Charles to death. What if it hadn’t worked on the first try?

How would Stapleton, if he had been seen, justify his presence on the moor in the company of a giant dog coated with phosphorus?

It’s also odd that Stapleton is absent from the climactic scene.

Bayard comes up with a new hypothesis. Stapleton owns the dog, which is harmless, simply because he finds it fun to scare people and likes to be left alone. Sir Charles’s and Selden’s deaths were both accidents. Beryl Stapleton was the one who encouraged Dr Mortimer’s suspicions, attracted Holmes’s attention in London, and ultimately created the figure of the murder with the dog. All of this was her way of getting rid of her husband, so that she could marry Sir Henry, kill him, and inherit his fortune!

There are several glaring holes in this hypothesis, though. The phosphorus painted around the dog’s eyes and mouth is explained as a means of keeping track of the dog in the dark. But then why only paint its face, rather than striping its body with paint? Not to mention the bizarrerie of keeping a mythical hound in the first place.

More importantly, we are told that Beryl changed around the signs which marked a safe path through the marsh, then told her husband that his dog had gotten loose and run into the marsh. Stapleton ran after it, got lost in the dark, and drowned.

A murder without a weapon, without a threat, without an insult, where the victim puts himself to death while the other characters applaud--it would be hard to find a finer triumph in the annals of crime.

But if it was that easy, why wasn’t that enough? Why involve Holmes, Mortimer and Sir Charles at all? We are repeatedly told that it’s easy to get lost and drown in the marsh, so I see no reason the police would have suspected Stapleton’s death wasn’t an accident. Of course, if Beryl was planning to carry out the same plan with Sir Henry, it might look more suspicious the second time around. But Beryl’s plan is supposed to begin before Mortimer consults Holmes--several weeks before Sir Henry comes to Baskerville, when no one has seen him or knows anything about him.

In a larger sense, Bayard’s method raises the question of the relationship between fiction and nonfiction.

From my perspective, everything I read or hear which I cannot myself confirm from experience falls into the same category. This is hinted at when we see old-timey novels describe themselves as ‘histories’. (Tom Jones, Don Quixote, Charles XII of Sweden and Julius Caesar all get ‘histories’.) ‘Nonfiction’ histories and ‘fictional’ novels are both unverifiable descriptions of past events. And my perception of their plausibility or lack thereof is not correlated with my belief in their ‘truth’. For instance, I find both the story of Watergate and that of “Pride and Prejudice” quite credible--on the other hand, the story of Auschwitz and that of “Bleak House” are both incredible. But I describe only the first and third as ‘nonfiction’, because other people have told me to do so.

Bayard refuses to draw a clear line between the two.

Language does not allow us to make a separation between real beings and imaginary characters, and so the integration of characters into reality is inevitable, whether one has an open mind or not.

Although wouldn’t it be cool if it did! A propos, I’ve always been intrigued by the French ‘journalistic’ use of the conditional, where

The president would have (aurait) planned to fake the moon landing...

means the president is alleged to, is thought to, or has apparently planned to fake it.

It’s incredible that by changing the grammar of a sentence and nothing else, the certainty of the sentence is undermined.

Why do you buy things new?

It's a little more effort to search out what you want at a resale/consignment/used goods store, but it's worth it. New books are ridiculously overpriced and bad for the environment. (My favorite used book site is alibris.com.)

As for furniture, with some patience you can get beautiful, interesting pieces for the same price you would pay for something boring and new.

For instance, at Ikea the cheapest armchairs are 70-100 dollars. They are also quite boring and not very comfortable, and, worst, had that recognizable IKEA aesthetic. At resale stores, I found two beautiful armchairs--an upholstered chair for $75 and a leather one for $150. They are both comfortable, durable, and they have Character. (You will like them.) I also found that many lamps, couches, pillows and tables are available used for prices similar to or less than Ikea's.

Additional fun is provided by haggling. As a shy, naïve person, I reduced these prices by $130 just by asking--imagine what a bold, experienced person could do!

Sometimes I shop at resale stores in Petworth and, as a young white woman, get the best customer service I have ever experienced. Once, a salesman, out of the goodness of his heart, decided to educate me.

Him: This pin is ten dollars. Is that okay?

Me: Yes.

Him: Are you sure?

Me: Yes.

Him: Really?

Me: Ye..ss....um, actually, how about five dollars?

Him: Done.

And then I realized I was supposed to negotiate.

From a linguistic perspective, I love this sentence from Mad Men:

"Probably wadn't going to happen for her tonight."

The implied 'it' is 'getting laid'. Who says English can't have sentences without subjects?

It clearly happens more often with emotionally charged subjects like sex.

On HL Mencken

A new biography of Mencken reviewed in the Atlantic and also, less flatteringly, in a libertarian magazine. Both interesting. BUT:

About halfway through the first, the author of the review begins to share his deeply limited moral opinions with us.

In many respects, some of them important, [Mencken] was not a nice man. [He was] a "poseur" whose public utterances and persona were often calculated for effect rather than accurately representing the man's true character and convictions. On top of all that he was a hypochondriac, a workaholic, outwardly sociable yet inward, aloof, and a grouch.

Now, Mencken would have considered some of these qualities--his showmanship rather than sincerity, industriousness, and self-sufficiency--virtues rather than vices. Other qualities--the hypochondriasis and grouchiness--are incidental personal qualities over which no one has any control.

The reviewer also calls HLM a racist and anti-Semite, despite acknowledging Mencken's friendships with many Jews and some blacks. How does that work, exactly? In fact, he did hate Negros and Jews as groups--but he also hated Christians, Southerners, the English, New Englanders, Americans, the middle classes, women and all humanity as groups--yet on a individual scale, he could appreciate people of whatever group. That's called misanthropy, not bigotry. You can't simultaneously praise an author for being 'provocative', then criticize him for provoking you!

And someone should inform the author of the second review that "Hottentot" is an old-fashioned geographical adjective, not an ethnic slur.

Also, two quotes I completely agree with:

In so far as my personal relations with it offer any evidence, the government I live under is devoted exclusively to extortion and oppression.

For Mencken, "work was the important thing, and everything else had to revolve around it and fit into it."

As it should.

The thing that annoys me about Mencken is his inexplicably bad literary taste. He is convinced that such mediocrities as Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser are the greatest authors who ever lived. Mencken was a masculinist, and that I can accept--but among masculine authors, who would choose Conrad over Melville?? He hated Puritan New Englanders like Robert Frost and Louisa May Alcott who wrote in order to teach moral lessons, and said that the novel should "tell life as it is and never, ever preach"--but he loved the dull let-us-forgive-the-fallen-woman preachiness of self-consciously Modern authors like Dreiser and GB Shaw.

I think the solution to this mystery is that Mencken was basically too German and not French enough. He approved of authors whose atheism and Americanism (Twain) and anti-Puritan morals (Dreiser) and aristocratic leanings (Conrad) were similar to his own. He was too busy looking at their ideas to notice that none of them could write a decent sentence. (well, occasionally Conrad).

Finally, why is it that no one can be a Social Darwinist without being commonly accused of believing that all men ought to be clones of himself? A person can look down on others without idolizing himself. As Nietzsche himself knew, you can't escape your family--so the man who wanted to be a German aristocrat was in fact a middle-class American journalist. Mencken would have been the first to admit he had more in common with a beer-drinking German burgher than with the Ubermensch.

Defining disease

A Slate article on the prevalence of medical overdiagnosis is mostly skippable summary of what we already know. The interesting part comes near the end:

Many critics of modern medical care see overdiagnosis everywhere they look and don't reliably separate the wheat from the chaff. They derisively state that coughing children are too often labeled asthmatic; "twitchy legs" and "impaired sex drive" are inexplicably considered medical problems; those who can't read are for some reason called dyslexic; those who are just sad are instead said to be depressed; and people with joint pain are termed arthritic. The subtext of their comments is, There's nothing wrong with these people. Yet they're still patients who can't sleep, breathe, read, or enjoy sexual relations. They seek help, and it's wrong to ignore them...let's not blame people with dyslexia, erectile dysfunction, or restless leg syndrome for the mess.

Here are the errors. First, the assumption that anything which can be given a fancy name is a disease. Remember that "erectile dysfunction" has only been a disease since Viagra was invented. Before that, men dealt with their psychological problems through psychological means. It's nice that we have drugs now, but they shouldn't be portrayed as the only way to solve a person's problems.

Second, the idea that people who are suffering should be helped does not imply that 'we' (doctors, health insurance companies) should help them. But of course if we were to admit that these conditions are largely within the patients' power to change, we would have to give up our power over them and our ability to define them as 'patients'.

Third, the idea that denying 'disease' status to these conditions amounts to 'blaming' people who suffer from them. Because a person who 'has a disease' deserves our pity and forbearance, while a person who has a simple psychological problem doesn't. This way of thinking is why people like gathering meaningless diagnoses in both the medical and psychological fields. 'Having a disease' allows them to deny their own responsibility for their lives.

Fourth, the error of believing that every problem needs to be solved. It's not okay for people to have flaws and weaknesses; people should be equal, with no personality differences; if some people are bad at reading, they have a disease which needs to be cured. If some people are sad, they need to be argued or drugged out of it.

All common themes in modern medical discourse. All wrong.

Worst Supremes decision ever

The worst Supreme Court decision ever, among those which haven't been overturned, is Coker v. Georgia, decided 7-2, my God. It held that it's unconstitutional under the 8th amendment to apply the death penalty for rape. (Incidentally, the criminal in question was not only a rapist, but a murderer who had escaped the death penalty once already.)

What led to this ridiculous miscarriage of justice? First, the Court at the time was all male, which may have led to their conclusion that rape is not a 'serious injury'. Secondly, acc. to Wikipedia, two justices voted as they did due to their belief that the death penalty is cruel and unusual under all circumstances. Male bias combined with liberal bias, and I doubt it will ever be overturned.

The second worst decision is Trop v Dulles, which held that the 8th amendment prohibits depriving someone of his citizenship (for the crime of desertion, in this case), because, according to Earl Warren, "denationalization as a punishment is barred by the 8th amendment, as it is the total destruction of the individual's status in organized society".

The dissent rightly questioned whether denationalization is a more severe punishment than murder.

I personally think exile or denationalization is an unjustly neglected punishment in our modern world. There are so many people (many murderers and thieves and all rapists) who don't belong in my society. I would be OK with killing most of them, but the trend of public opinion is against me. Why not exile? It's not cruel; it's giving them a new beginning, far from me. Europe will take them. Or they can go to Somalia and be as lawless as they like.

I'm trying to memorize all 27 amendments (at least the gist of them). Still really vague on the difference between the 12th, 20th and 25th (dealing with Presidential succession). Could I look them up right now with the magic of the Internet? Yes. Or I could watch another Michael Jackson video.

Also, weird the ones that stick in my head. Why do I have the 11th amendment memorized verbatim? It's kind of poetic, really.

"The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State."

the Cafe Aurora

Today I had an annoying experience which I will not discuss and an exciting experience which I will! I Googled coffee shops in Alexandria, and the closest one I found was called the Cafe Aurora. (Obviously, I was interested not in coffee, but in Internet.) But what Google _didn't_ tell me was that the Cafe Aurora is an Eritrean café!

Yes, this is my first contact with the noble nation of Eritrea, and it made a good impression. Free wireless, first of all. I can only hope the whole country is like that.

Secondly, I ordered the (only) dish with the Arabic name and the tea with the Arabic name. (They speak Arabic in Eritrea, in case you were wondering.) This was a gamble which turned out quite well. The 'fuul' was a dish of fava beans, crushed with olive oil, topped with feta cheese, green peppers, red onions, tomatoes and hot peppers, and served with pita bread. I always appreciate colorful food, and this was delicious too. I will definitely come back for the fuul.

The innocent-looking tea was filled with hidden danger. My first social "faux pas" in Eritrea: I was served delicious spice tea with an extra tea bag on the side, and drank it. BUT what I later found out was that what I thought was the tea was actually some sort of herbal, cardamomy flavored water base, and that the tea bag was supposed to contribute the actual tea! What a tea amateur I must have seemed. In fact, perhaps because of my cartoonishly low tolerance for caffeine, I actually preferred the non-tea.

That is all.

Update: the Cafe Aurora has two mottoes.

Cafe Aurora: We Rise With the Sun.

Makes sense.

Cafe Aurora: The Land of Common Sense.

???

Today I had an acrimonious argument with my roommate (the lying, irresponsible jerk...but that's beside the point) and, afterwards, I felt bad about it, so I went for a run as stress relief.

Let's take a look at that...a stressful stimulus elicited a healthy response! OMG, this may be the most emotionally healthy reaction I've had in twenty years.

I think I'll open some champagne to celebrate.

Birth control

This article on the politics of abortion is pretty okay, but the interesting part is the statistics:

Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn’t used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn’t know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn’t get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn’t expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.

This isn’t a shortage of pills or condoms. It’s a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It’s a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation — and the subsequent killing, through abortion — of a developing human being.

(And those women who said they did use birth control were probably often talking about nothing but a condom!)

I think we need to, as far as we can, dissociate birth control from sex. As it is, people think of the decision to go on birth control as a preparation for sex; which makes young women hesitant about starting birth control, or about admitting it. (That's probably why so many young women say they're on the pill for medical reasons.) Now, the average age of first sexual intercourse in the U.S. is sixteen. Not a few girls do it at 12 or 13. Every woman should go on birth control by the age of 14 at the latest. As a precautionary measure. I would advise a public relations campaign aimed at parents. Parents don't like to admit their daughters will have sex--well, frame it as a medical issue, as was done more or less successfully with the HPV vaccine. That way, the ones who want to have sex will do it without being so neurotic about it and without getting pregnant, and the ones who don't won't be harmed.

On suicide

In our culture, suicide is the result of insanity; nothing else. It is often described as a ‘cowardly’ refusal to face the problems of life. The idea that living might be a cowardly refusal to face the problems of death is not considered. People who kill themselves are thought to be motivated by some sort of disguised desire for life; witness the popular belief that Muslim suicide bombers are motivated by sex. During World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots were thought to be motivated by Shinto superstition; there were rumors about their having been given drink and drugs in order to key them up for the mission; some said they were chained into their cockpits. All misguided attempts at understanding them. (In fact, most of the kamikaze pilots were not religious, and before their flights they indulged in nothing stronger than a flask of sake, a frugal meal, and some farewell poetry.)

A kamikaze pilot wrote, “May our death be as sudden and clean as the shattering of crystal!” (Compare the modern ideal of death: dying in bed, asleep, without a struggle.)

A Japanese military instructor told his student: “Never shirk facing death. If in doubt whether to live or die, it is always better to die.”

The kamikaze pilots sung a song with the lines,

Never think of winning!
Thoughts of victory will only bring defeat.
When we lose, let us press forward, ever forward!

When I was younger, I studied Japanese history for a while. One book I came across was “The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan”, by the Orientalist and translator Ivan Morris. I read about 20 pages and liked it so much I put it aside and didn’t read it for ten years.

Anyway, recently I finally finished the book. It is an attempt to examine the ‘failed hero’ in Japanese tradition. As Morris says, the failed hero is not a man who fights, achieves his objective, and then dies. It’s a hero who, despite superhuman strength, courage and spiritual purity, never achieves what he set out to do. He may even help produce exactly the outcome he opposed: did the kamikaze pilots convince the U.S. to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In the classic case, the hero’s failure is obvious and inevitable from the beginning (like Mishima’s 1970 attempt to restore the power of the emperor). Morris says, “he is the man whose single-minded sincerity will not allow him to make the manoeuvres and compromises that are so often needed for mundane success...His death is no temporary setback which will be redeemed by his followers, but represents an irrevocable collapse of the cause he has championed.”

Yet somehow the failed hero has more purchase in the Japanese imagination than the successful hero;. In a Western context, it is as if Napoleon’s military successes were a mere footnote to Waterloo, Elba and death.

[One gets the impression that Ivan Morris wrote this book partially as an attempt to cope with the suicide of his friend, the nihilist nationalist novelist Mishima Yukio, who wrote one of the first memoirs to be open about the author’s homosexuality (“Confessions of a Mask”). Morris doesn’t devote a chapter to Mishima, but he seems to bring his name up at every opportunity.]

If it isn’t obvious, I myself feel a great deal of sympathy with this sort of attitude to suicide. I remember reading Shakespeare’s long poem, “The Rape of Lucrece”, when I was rather young, and deciding that if I were ever raped I would definitely slit my throat and ask to be buried under the lilac bush in the back yard. A naïve, morbid child; but I still basically think the same way. If you are the type of person who believes, like too many modern Americans, that there is nothing in life worth dying for, I am not talking to you. Those of us who can understand dying for a cause might be able to take the extra step towards understanding the desire to die for a cause while knowing your death will do no practical good.

The recent biographical film about Hunter S. Thompson insisted that his suicide was ‘inexplicable’--that it must have been a result of mental illness or drugs. On the contrary, it seems to have been a considered, rational choice. But the makers of the film couldn’t accept that. I wish someone had told them this: a good biographer studies his subject’s interaction with his culture. A bad biographer imposes his culture’s standards upon his subject.

On memory

Rhiannon, a character in Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils” is talking about how, in retrospect, she never really liked going to the beach, but she ‘did enjoy parts anyway’.

“You noticed things like your hair and what horrible stuff sand is but you didn't really take it in. You were wondering how it was going and what would happen next and whether you could handle it. “

A very Proustian passage. We don’t really know what we’re experiencing when we’re experiencing it. While things are coming at us, as Amis says, we’re focused on how we’re doing, what other people are likely to do next, and probably how unfair they’re being. Only later, sometimes years later, can we look at ourselves as if the person we were in the past was a character in a book; or rather, sometimes, in a case study. Then we think, well, that was really terrible wasn’t it? How could I have accepted that as normal? Or, how was I not aware how lucky I was?

I think Dostoyevsky says somewhere that man is the animal who can get used to anything. That’s why you can never really ask someone to judge his life. Are you happy? If he says yes, he may mean, yes, happier than I was yesterday. Or, happier than I was in my childhood. And there’s always the possibility that what makes him judge himself happy is and always has been below what makes you judge yourself happy. And there is, as far as I know, no way to measure happiness except through these useless personal reports.

In conclusion, human knowledge is largely illusory.

Pasta with Swiss chard and cream sauce

My roommate gave me a can of cream of celery soup the other day and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. I sat staring for a few minutes trying to figure out why anyone would put celery in soup. Then I found this recipe.

And it’s good! Even before adding the cheese & sour cream, the vegetable/cream of celery sauce was delicious!

But, like most American-style recipes, the dish needs more vegetables and more spice. I added black pepper, a little cayenne pepper, and some whole brown mustard seeds. Not too much spice, because the dish is already fairly strong-flavored.

For vegetables, I used blanced spinach and Swiss chard, sliced plum tomatoes and canned artichoke hearts. I also grated and sautéd some red cabbage, then sprinkled it on top for color as well as nutrition.

I drank a cheap rosé.

The most interesting idioms are the offensive ones

The English really used to hate the Dutch. We’ve all heard of Dutch treat and Dutch courage, but what about other expressions of hateful chauvinism, such as:

Dutch widow (a prostitute)
Dutch bargain (a drunken agreement)
Dutch feast (one at which the host gets drunk before his guests)
Dutch uncle (a brutal adviser)
Dutch reckoning (a non-itemized bill)

I guess the common thread is that something that is 'Dutch' is not what it purports to be, or not how it should be (like an 'Indian giver'). Fascinating!

the Velvet Tango Room

If you are the type of asshole who likes to spend the precious time remaining to you on earth sitting around complaining about people who put vodka in martinis, this is the bar for you!


The location is very speakeasy; you pass the West Side Market, cross a bridge, and a block later, between the abandoned houses and the train tracks, you are in the sort of place which seems to have nothing at all acceptable to offer. Until...

The inside is fairly informal, which I approve of. Evening gowns are fun sometimes, but I do not like feeling I have to dress up to my drink. Speakeasies were not upper-class venues; they were democratic if anything; cocktails should be the same.

Speaking of cocktails, my first was the Manhattan, made with rye! I was already won over; this is the only bar I've been to which served rye. They also use a house-made sweet vermouth, actually more of a red wine reduction--winey and fruity. I wasn't expecting so much vermouth, and would have preferred a more modern Manhattan--but their version was really more artistic than the 4 to 1 ratio I'm used to. Also, real Maraschino cherries. The whole drink was as dark as grape juice--in contrast to other bars' Manhattans that look, and taste, drenched in cherry syrup.

If you are like me, you look down on the Whiskey Sour. A bar version is drowned in sour mix; my home version tends to be either too sour or flavorless. The Velvet Tango Room version will destroy everything you thought you knew about whiskey sours. The secret: an egg white! I even got a scientific explanation for this; because an egg white is thick protein, it smooths out the sour tastes; because an egg white is bland, you don't taste it, but you feel its smooth, foamy texture. The lemon taste is there, but it doesn't intrude. It's more like the lime in a very subtle key lime pie.

At the bar, I dared to drink the raw egg; at home, I would drop it in briskly boiling water for ten seconds, then fish it out and ice it. This keeps the egg white liquid and shakeable while, I am told, killing any germs.

Another drink I look down on is the Dark & Stormy. The Velvet Tango Room makes their own ginger beer, and I have high hopes for it. I will report on this later.

I have a bottle of Luxardo maraschino liqueur. It's been here for a year. I hate it, I hate the way it tastes, and I want it gone. After I went on in this vein for a while, I received an Aviation cocktail. Gin, lemon juice and maraschino. No crème de violette-that would be 'gilding the lily'. It was quite good--the Luxardo was the first and last taste perceivable, but there was so much in between that I was willing to tolerate it.

My fourth choice was the Widow's Kiss--Benedictine, Chartreuse and something I forget. This has interesting ingredients, but somehow they don't come together to form any whole, and nothing except sweetness was discernible from the Benedictine. Of course, my taste buds may have been dulled by this point.

More exciting drinks to try here: an Apple Brandy Sour, Caipirinha, and Hemingway Daiquiri (I drink the latter at home all the time, but it's very tart; an egg white might do a great job polishing up the grapefruit and lime flavors.)

It soon became obvious to the owner that my companion and I were interested in cocktails, which resulted in scads of free cocktails, conversation and compliments, in a transparent and successful attempt to get us to come back. Almost as good as the booze is the chance to nerd out over it. I also went home with a free bottle of their house-made bitters, which is full of Vietnamese cinnamon. So, it's already in my top three bars, and I may not be able to go back to #2.

The drinks are all $10 during Happy Hour and $15 at other times--which I consider reasonable, for the quality. And of course, if you don't like a drink, you can request a free replacement.

This whole experience made me realize how damn lazy I've been when it comes to drinking! If I try something and don't like it, I just forget about it and go back to an old standby or boring old Scotch & soda. If I were just a little more Scientific about it, and bought better mixers, and tried some adjusting, I'm sure my range of drinks would be greatly expanded.

For instance, the Knockout Cocktail:

1 oz dry vermouth
1 oz gin
1/2 oz anisette
1 tsp white c de m
cherry

I drink this, but I drink it knowing it's mediocre. What about Pernod rather than anisette? What about an egg white? And a more upscale crème de menthe, if there is one, would make a big difference. Update to follow!

What not to name your children

Here is a list of the most popular baby names! It seems a little off to me because all the names are so damn upper crust. Ethan? Alexis? Isabella?

Bell peppers

As a bell pepper ripens, it turns from green to yellow, orange, or red, depending on the variety. These bright peppers are sweeter simply because they are ripe, whereas the bitter green pepper is unripe. Purple peppers, too, are harvested when immature and would turn an uncommonly dark green if allowed to ripen fully. So unless you're fond of the tannic bitterness of the common green and the purple varieties, we suggest sticking with yellow, orange, or red.

[Cook's Illustrated]

Atheism vs. idolatry

Pierre Bayle, the 17th-century French Enlightenment philosopher, wrote a book called "Pensées sur la comète" which starts with comets but very quickly switches to what he really wants to talk about, which is the connection between religion and social order. The book is an attempt to stop talking about the superiority of Christians over atheists (an argument Bayle knew the atheists couldn't win) and start talking about the superiority of atheists over idolators. (Idolators here are defined as anyone who is fanatical, superstitious, or follows the wrong religious.)

Here's Bayle's brillant analogy: a husband prefers that his wife be indifferent to all men rather than succumbing to both him and to another man, while the Gallant is fine with her loving both her husband and him. Similarly, God might prefer us to be atheists rather than subscribing to the wrong religion! A clever twist on Pascal's wager.

Jerry Falwell and Christopher Hitchens

Sometimes, when I might be feeling a little down, or when my ability to judge others seems to be wavering, I'll watch this video.


Even on a casual news program, Hitchens' word choice is awesome. 'Chaucerian frauds'. And some quotes:

I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to.

People like that should be out in the street shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup!

--Do you believe he believed what he spoke?
Of course not! He woke up every morning pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking, I've got away with it again!

If he read the Bible at all, and I would doubt that he could actually read any long book--at all...

And then after about my 20th viewing I began to notice his stumbling over words; in this part in particular he is clearly drunk:

L- lots of people are going to die and are already lea- leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this (beat) man.

Awesome!

Wine recommendation

This dry Riesling from New Zealand is delicious!




The Kim Crawford Marlborough Dry Riesling 2006. Not expensive. I can't describe tastes yet, so I'll just go with 'delicious'.

My new diet.

Breakfast:
1 egg. 1 glass wine.
Lunch:
2 eggs. 2 glasses wine.
Dinner:
1 steak. The rest of the bottle.

Seriously. I'm only doing this for a few days, in case you're worried about my getting scurvy. Although, as I recently learned, only 1/2 ounce of lemon juice a day is enough to prevent scurvy! That's right: you heard it here first: one whiskey sour a day, and you never have to eat fruit again! And it's the excuse you've been wanting to have whiskey for breakfast.

An essay on how reading leads to drinking and drinking leads to reading.

This is how addictions begin, subtly and then suddenly. Soon I found myself devouring every hard-boiled word of Chandler’s. And then I read them again. I started talking in similes and metaphors. One day I told a dear friend that he had a face like a collapsed lung. I couldn’t help myself. A progression took hold. Chandler led me to Hammett and from Hammett I staggered to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald led me to Hemingway.

I personally am unable to read even the most indirect reference to Dorothy Parker without craving a martini.

Matching wine with Eastern food

"Let them drink beer!" So said my wine connoisseur friend when I outlined my dilemma. My boss and his wife were coming over for dinner, and we had decided to prepare an Indian feast (a big mistake, as it turned out, but more on that in another column). Hence the question: What wine to serve with Indian food?

I'm so glad someone addressed this problem! The article is on Slate: with Indian food Gewürztraminer or pinot blanc apparently works. For Japanese food, dry French whites are recommended. I prefer red wine, but I haven't found any that really match with spicy vegetarian food.

FYI

"There is no doctor-approved way to strangle yourself while having sex or while masturbating", according to this.

Why I can't enjoy film

Reading in our world has a sort of old, sedate, peaceful, slow image, while TV and movies are perceived as fast, exciting and youthful. Many people think that TV is shortening our attention spans! The truth is precisely the contrary: my attention span is too short to do anything but read. With 98% of movies, I get bored after about 20 minutes and start to multitask. Even with the few really good movies, I prefer to watch in 30-minute installments.

Think about it: how many words do you take in per second? Quickly testing it with a fairly easy nonfiction text, I found I read 7-10 words per second. That means that, several times per second, something is happening. In nonfiction, an argument is being presented or an example given. In fiction, even if nothing is happening in the plot, there’s a description, a philosophical aside, or a thought-provoking word choice to focus on.

(N.B.: This assumes you are reading an actually good book. If you are one of those people who read books for their plot, you might as well just switch to TV. I will not miss you.)

If I think the book is going too slowly, I can just read faster. Alternatively, I can skip forward, reading a few sentences every few pages, and see if anything more interesting promises to come.

With film, skipping forward is impossible. Watching TV or a movie in a theatre, there is no way you can figure out what’s going to happen--you have to make an absolute yes-or-no decision about whether to stay and watch. With a DVD, you can of course skip scenes; but that never gives you as much information as skimming through a book. You can skip to the beginning of the next scene, but that might not be the most interesting part. In order to see if it is, you have to watch the whole scene! It’s slavery! You can fast-forward, but all you’ll see will be vague moving shapes; you might be fast-forwarding past the best dialogue in the film, without knowing it.

Moreover, everything moves more slowly in filmed media. Things happen in the superficial sense, but anything interesting takes forever! A ton of any movie or TV show--even the good ones--will be taken up with shots intended to establish the setting or the time period--with shots showing you the characters’ clothes 0r houses or bodies or faces--with shots of their movements or observations--with fistfights and sex. Even in scenes containing dialogue, the actors speak incredibly slowly, compared to the speed at which you would read their words. If you’re familiar with the written text, it’s painful to watch the words dragging and halting by (compare reading “The Importance of Being Earnest” to watching the, nevertheless good, movie!).

I admit that there are certain respects in which the visual image can be more effective; but these are all relatively shallow areas of experience. The sex scene which might arouse male viewers--the sight of an emotional face which appeals to the sentimental--the skeleton jumping out unexpectedly which makes me jump. Anything deeper than these effects which a movie wishes to convey could probably be done as well or better in print.

The exception is comedy, which is actually easier to do in film. With a good episode of “Seinfeld”, for instance, something funny or at least attention-catching is happening every few seconds. (“Seinfeld” also illustrates the fact that in a comedy of whatever kind, all or most emotion must be leached out in order to maintain the comic mood and keep an audience’s interest.) Animated comedies are especially easy for me to appreciate, since their creators usually realize we aren’t interested in lengthy shots of clothes, faces or emotions belonging to animated figures.

I do think, however, that an authentically funny creation is a rare, virtuoso performance, which even the masters can’t keep alive for more than, say, 30 pages or twenty minutes. I honestly can’t remember any non-animated full-length film which I’ve enjoyed for the comedy!

There are other, vaguely personal reasons why I can't enjoy film--but, basically, if I refuse to watch a movie with you; it's not you, it's the entire cinematic tradition.

Blanched spinach: a miracle food

Pretty much every time I cook, about halfway through the process it suddenly occurs to me that, hey, I could blanche some spinach and throw it in here. It works for almost any dish: omelet, casserole, soup, chili, curry, pasta, or tortilla dish. Blanching is easy and spinach is one of the most nutritious foods ever. You can reduce several handfuls of spinach:


to a tiny quantity of cooked spinach:

so that you can incorporate extra nutrients into almost any meal with very little effect on its color, texture or taste.

Also, if you fail to eat spinach fast enough and it gets crushed and starts to rot, you don't have to throw it away; just blanche it and mix it in, and it retains its palatibility.

The universality of literature

This article on women's writing is surprisingly unobjectionable--until I got to this! Near the end we find a single isolated sentence: "Great Literary American Novel Syndrome is a surprisingly persistent condition, despite the increasingly obvious likelihood that no work of art can sum up a nation as heterogeneous as ours without neglecting somebody."

Note the implied idea that a great writer can never speak for someone who is different than him. What the hell. This is Chinua Achebe's obscenely obtuse critique of "Heart of Darkness" all over again. Am I only to read heterosexual female Polish/Scottish 22-year-old authors? If I can find part of myself--not my Eastern European features or my sex, but the most important part of myself reflected in, say, a middle-aged gay French man, then other people should be able to do the same. If they can't, it's their own damn fault.

For a great author--no, even a good one--doesn't just write about the superficial. His characters have hair colors and ages and nationalities, but they have other, more important, characteristics--their personalities are what we identify with--or even more deeply human characteristics.

This said, I do admit that the superficial qualities of characters and authors can make it easier or harder for us to appreciate them. It was, for instance, a strikingly bad idea to make my sophomore language class (a class of mostly female 20-year-olds) spend all year studying old men (Lear and Oedipus). Some of us may be able to reach past the different superficialites--just like some women can reach past the annoyance of an author who assumes all his readers are male. But the fact that there are women and non-white people who write makes it easier for a lot of us to find literature from which to learn.